Moving into the cloud

Last week I setup a server in a cloud based on Xen virtualization technology. After some hours research I decided to go for the Rackspace cloud. I chose the minimal setup to start with, which is a 256MB memory configuration that comes with 10GB disk space. As stated in the specs, the 256MB plan will get you 1/64 of the CPU allocation. Which is fine to start with for a standard LAMP setup.

For now they only offer a large variety of Linux distributions. I chose Debian 5.0 Lenny, because it makes migration easier as the site is running on Debian 5.0 already. The registration process and setup of the minimal Debian install went very smoothly. In under two hours I had successfully migrated a website. So for the setup part I am totally satisfied, let’s see how the availability part will develop.